True Friends
by skyblue828
Summary: Annie is just trying to deal with dating and the pressures of normal life as a teenager, when her parents suddenly come back into her life. She turns to her writing where she gets accepted to attend writing school in Italy. There she finds reality.


Chapter One

Love is a complicated thing. It's tricky, like the Greek god, Hermes. Both like to play games and taunt others. Love is so hard to get right. Just when you think, you're finally happy and have it right for once, it makes an unexpected twist and your life is spiraling out of control. Oh, there are good things but they don't matter as much. When you're in love, it's like walking on air. All the bad things go away. But it's ten times better if the other person loves you back. When that happens, it's like nothing can ever go wrong for you. You could walk through fire and you wouldn't get hurt.

Some people wait all their lives to fall in love with that one special person, including me. Oh, I've fallen in plenty of times. The only problem is that no one ever falls in love with me. I'm the only girl in my Junior class who has never had a boyfriend. I've never even been on a freakin' date. I've come close, but it always starts and ends the same. Guys came over to me and we start talking for a while. Then a while turns into days and the guy always looks like he's into me and is going to ask me out any day now. When I can tell a guy wants to ask me out, I have him meet Sarah before he can. She's my best friend and I always get her approval on guys before I try to let them ask me out. Usually, she nods her approval to me and tells me how great he sounds. A few times, she rejected some of them. It wouldn't have mattered to me very much, except that they were the very hottest ones who had ever talked to me and I _really _wanted to date them. But Sarah knew best. She had _a lot_ of experience.

Sarah is known as the Date Queen at Washington High School in Portland, Oregon. She has dated every major hot and regularly hot guy in school. Now she's on the semi-hot guys. She's even gone back and dated previous exs because she didn't want to have to try and find a less hot guy. No one has ever turned Sarah down since she started dating back in the seventh grade. Guys just couldn't resist her beauty. Sarah is tall with long, blonde hair that flows to her lower back. Her outfits are always awesome and smokin'. In order to have original clothes, Sarah makes all of them herself. Once a week she goes shopping for fabric and accessories, then spends six hours making the clothes for the week. It would take longer, but Sarah is a master at it by now. She's tried to make me clothes a few times, but I can't seem to pull it off. But the main things that made Sarah the Date Queen was her body. She had an awesome body, the kind that you only saw in magazines by the hottest super models. I knew for a fact that every girl in our school envied Sarah because of her body. Everyone, including me, wished that had her body. As I was saying, all of my pre-relationships ended badly. Everything would be working out smoothly and then suddenly I would walk into school and the guy would completely ignore me and talk to some other girl. As if we hadn't spent the last few days laughing and getting to be friends. It happened every time. Once, the day before, I saw Sarah talking to my guy-friend in a corner of the hallway but she was probably trying to get to know him better if her best friend was going to date him. She was just being a good friend. She would never intentionally try to hurt me. I didn't get it, I thought I was cute enough for be datable. I was shorter than Sarah but I was still decently tall. I always wore my long, red hair down around my shoulders. I still wore sneakers, but less and less often and I never wore t-shirts anymore. One of my magazines said that guys liked girls who dressed prettier and looked like they had confidence. That explains how Sarah always got dates, well that and her body.

_Ring! Ring!_ Ugh. My phone was going off. I was sure it was my dad, calling me from the shop to wake me up for another painful day of school. My last guy-friend broke up with me yesterday and I wasn't completely over it yet. Sarah said I should get over it and move on but when I started crying she said he cheated on her when they dated and wasn't worth my time. I didn't believe it one bit. No one ever cheated on Sarah; Sarah cheated on them. But it was still nice that she was trying. I rolled over and my chocolate lab puppy, Sammy made a bark of protest as I disrupted his sleeping position.

_Ring! Ring! _My phone demanded my full attention. Groaning, I sat up and snatched the phone from the nightstand.

"Okay, okay. I'm awake," I said into the phone, my voice thick with sleep.

"Good," Dad smiled into the phone. He wasn't really my dad. He was my uncle. But my parents couldn't take care of me so, being that my mom's older sister died in an earthquake the year my mom met my dad, my mom asked my father's brother to help them out. Well, _couldn't_ is a strong word. My dad couldn't but my mom certainly could. She just didn't _want_ to. So "Have a good day. I'll see you at home tonight." It was the usual greeting and parting. He always said_, I'll see you at home tonight. _He was a mechanic so I could walk down the road to his shop after school but he didn't like me to. He lost his wife and son in a fire at the shop and he hated the idea of me being there in case something happened. There were very rare occasions when he would allow me to come to the shop. The last time I surprised him by coming, he was real angry. I got grounded for over a month. So now he specifies where he wants me to meet him.

I quickly showered and got dressed, wearing my cutest blue top, a denim skirt and heels. I left my hair down and focused on my makeup. I had blush, blue eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara and blue tinted lip gloss. After all, my favorite actress, Kiara McCoy, says that any face can be transformed and made prettier. It just takes a little product. Or a lot, in my case. I finished putting on my makeup and sat on my bed, staring at the clock. I usually took longer to get ready. Maybe I took less time than usual because I wasn't trying to impress anyone in particular. I was trying to impress everyone.

Finally, I got up and went downstairs for breakfast. I had the house to myself, most of the time. Dad was at the shop before I needed to get up and he liked working in it in the afternoon and didn't come home until around seven or eight o'clock. It wasn't a bad schedule, just a lonely one. But I was used to that by now and was rarely ever home anyway. I liked to spend my afternoons with Sarah at her house but the word _house_ is an understatement. She lived in a mansion in Bakersfield Park. It was the rich neighborhood in our society. Anyone who had money lived there. And Sarah had a ton of cash.

Sarah's parents are former celebrities, which explains her outrageous beauty. Her dad used to be an actor. He was in a ton of movies, including that one about vampires and werewolves. It was like a number one movie of the year for three years. Everyone knows and loves him. Teenage girls, middle aged woman and occasionally a few confused boys, stand outside his house and beg for his autograph. Sarah told me that one time, a girl actually snuck into her house and surprised her dad while he was in the bathroom. Now everyone has to stand outside the gate that runs all the way around the property. Anyone who wants to get inside has to check in with the guard in a tollbooth at the front gate. Of course the guard new me by now, enough that she just waved me forward whenever she saw my car.

Like her dad, there were also people waiting around for her mom. Her mom used to be a model, one of the better ones in fact. Her picture was everywhere. Whenever we were little and I slept over, she'd tell me and Sarah stories about traveling to Milan and to Paris and Barcelona. She was very popular in Europe so she visited there quite often. A few years ago Sarah's family vacationed to England and Spain for a few weeks so her mom could visit some of her friends. They very generously volunteered to take me with them. It was fun. I didn't realize how popular her parents were until I saw the crowds that had to be held back by the Police. I knew her parents liked the attention. I did, too, but unfortunately I was never blessed with the gift of attention, like Sarah's family clearly was.

_Ding! _It was my phone again but this time it was a text from Sarah. I was supposed to pick her up for school this week since her car was getting a new paint job (pink this time) and she was wondering where I was. I sighed a deep low sigh. I didn't want to leave the house today. If I do, I'll have to walk the halls of high school and witness every other girl kiss and hug their boyfriends. I'd have to watch Sarah kiss her new boyfriend (she broke up with her previous one last night, apparently he sucked at kissing).

For a second, I debated whether or not to skip school. I've never skipped school a day in my life. The only time I've never been to school was the week that Cal Malarski walked too close to me in the hallway and gave me mono. I wanted to skip very badly but Sarah was counting on me so I sucked it up. I grabbed my backpack from the floor and said goodbye to Sammy. I grabbed my car keys from the rack by the door and left to go face the unknown.

Chapter Two


End file.
